The Foreskin Conundrum

Frank Furedi notes the hypocrisy of those who deplore male circumcision but who have nothing bad to say about FGM:

The rhetoric of demonology used to discredit circumcision presents it as an act of evil. Typically, circumcision is recast as an act of sordid violence against a child.  

Commentators casually use terms like ‘genital mutilation’ or ‘sexual mutilation’ to describe this religious custom. The semantic strategy of recasting male circumcision as ‘mutilation’ is a see-through attempt to lump it together with female circumcision. Through a process of guilt by rhetorical association, the circumcision of Jewish and Muslim boys is reinvented as a male equivalent of female genital mutilation (FGM).

But this attempt to depict male circumcision as something akin to FGM reveals a wilful ignorance of human anatomy. There are different forms of female circumcision, but as Nancy McDermott has argued on spiked, they all involve the ‘removal of some or all of a woman’s external genitalia’. The operation often has serious side effects, such as infection, pain, haemorrhaging and infertility. As McDermott says, ‘Comparable surgery in a man would involve the removal of most of the penis and the scrotum’. In reality, male circumcision as practised by Muslims and Jews involves the removal of the foreskin. And the fact that millions of boys are circumcised for non-religious reasons, either at birth or later in life after a health complication, shows that it is not a form of mutilation.

So how can an operation condemned as ‘sexual mutilation’ in one instance be advocated as an unobjectionable and sound medical procedure used to improve someone’s health in another instance? It seems pretty clear that it is not the physical aspects of circumcision that disgusts the moral crusaders, but rather its cultural meaning for some communities.